Thank you, Presiding Officer. The publication last week of the child practice review into the death in 2011 of Dylan Seabridge once again brought to our attention the circumstances in which a young boy’s life was cut needlessly short. Dylan was just eight years old and died of an avoidable and treatable vitamin deficiency. He died invisible to the services and professionals who could possibly have saved him. It is unacceptable that, in a modern society, a child should be invisible in this way. This case highlights the challenges faced when people individually, or as part of families, withdraw from traditional or common patterns of family life, and from the safeguarding and protection provided by and through our universal services.

The purpose of the child practice review is to improve our services and help us learn what needs to change. This is exactly what we intend to do in the light of this report: learn lessons and improve services.

The landscape has changed since 2011. The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act, in particular, strengthens the statutory and practice framework for safeguarding children and adults. It introduces a new duty on statutory partners to report to their local authority concerns that a child or adult is experiencing or is at risk of experiencing abuse, neglect or harm. The Act is supported by the revised statutory guidance that has been subject to significant cross-sector engagement. We have invested significantly, through dedicated training, to support practitioners to deliver the strengthened framework and have published those training resources on the care council website.

Of course, while the Act provides a stronger base for greater confidence that a case like Dylan’s could not happen again, it does not and cannot provide all of the answers. Much is made in the report of the issues of elective home education, and there is no doubt that this is part of the picture here, but it is far from the whole picture. Dylan died because he was invisible to the services and professionals who could have been able to help and protect him.

There was a criminal investigation into Dylan’s death, and the Crown Prosecution Service took a decision that the prosecution of the parents was not in the best public interest. What is clear to me from the CPR is that no single service or professional let down Dylan but that, as a society, as a system, he was let down and allowed to remain invisible and unreachable.

I’m working closely with my colleagues the Cabinet Secretary for Education, the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport and the Minister for Social Services and Public Health to consider the lessons from this case. Our response will be inclusive and seek to address the key issues of how services work together, how they pool their information and think family rather than individual in isolation, and about how we can prevent any child or young person from being so hidden from view that we cannot spot and address any risk of harm. ‘Think family’ is now more prevalent across professionals and agencies as part of approaches such as team around the family.

We will now consider how we can encourage and support professionals to act on their professional curiosity and have greater confidence to work effectively with families and be confident to escalate issues when needed, such as where the evidence for cause for concern might be, in fact, the lack of evidence of well-being. And we will consider the guidance and regulation in place for all adult and children’s services. Such consideration will, of course, include that around elective home education, but also in relation to the key milestones where parents and children would be anticipated to engage with health and other universal services, for example for vaccinations, the role of the health visitor, primary care teams, school nurses, GPs, and so on.

Dylan was not seen by any health, education, social or children’s services professionals between the age of 13 months and his death at the age of eight. In the final 18 months of Dylan’s life, efforts were made to engage with the family, and with Dylan, but with little success. We’ll never know how things may have turned out if those efforts had resulted in direct contact with Dylan. What we do know is that despite a level of concern, professionals were not able to gain access to a young and vulnerable child who died from a treatable condition.

This is a highly complex case, and you would not expect me, or my Cabinet colleagues, to respond in anything other than a considered manner. That said, I can report that whilst it is not routine practice to report to CPRs, I and my Cabinet colleagues feel that the unique issues raised by this case warrant us writing immediately to all safeguarding boards in Wales, and the national independent safeguarding board, drawing their attention to the issues raised and the findings of this report. I will be working closely with my colleagues to get to the heart of the issues raised by this case, and the CPR, and I will update the Chamber in due course of our intended actions.